


Cold-Blooded Creature

by LLitchi



Category: Elementary (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Childhood Friends, Childhood Friends, F/F, Fanart, Rating May Change
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-11-14
Updated: 2019-08-04
Packaged: 2019-08-23 16:37:27
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 3
Words: 11,185
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16622525
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/LLitchi/pseuds/LLitchi
Summary: AU: Jamie and Joan went to high school together. Close-to-canon and taking place around end of Season 1.





	1. The House by the Sea

**Author's Note:**

> The only thing more preposterous than Natalie Dormer’s American accent was Sherlock Holmes falling for it.

On the morning of the day that their lives would split in half, Joan is tired enough to ask Sherlock if he is afraid. There are other things she wants to know. She wants to know what Sherlock would do to Moriarty if he had him at his mercy, and she wants to know if she can persuade him not to do it. But this is what she ends up asking him, half way through both of them getting ready for their final battle, crammed in the bathroom upstairs and hopelessly unprepared: “Are you afraid?”

Should I be?

“I will ensure that no harm will come to you,” Sherlock says, understanding her real question.

“You can’t promise that.”

“And yet, I have.” He turns around, spits, finishes with cleaning his teeth. He believes it, which is almost enough to convince her.

Moriarty will not harm Sherlock, but Joan doesn’t know how Moriarty feels about Joan herself. Joan’s guarantee of safety comes only from her irrelevance, and anyway, what kind of war can two flies wage against a spider? The metaphor itself is strange and strangely unsettling, immediately so to Joan when Moriarty first used it. _I am a spider_ , he said, but why use a creature so symbolic of the feminine, a creature practically synonymous with its most famous species, the black widow? The spider is Louis Bourgeois’ favorite subject, her symbol of motherhood and femininity. The fragility of the spider’s limbs, the delicateness of its webs, the domesticity of its weavings. The way it lures its preys, traps them, and then watches them die.

Moriarty leads them to Sutter, not as some convoluted plot of Joan’s imagination, but only as a cautionary tale. Sutter who had his life ruined and who now shoulders the burden of having killed the wrong man in revenge, in the end is only useful to Moriarty as a simplistic lesson, and a brutally demonstrated one.

“Moriarty wanted to show me a man who craves vengeance,” Sherlock grouses when the case ends, “a man who destroys the lives of others.”

“Why does it feel like Moriarty knows you?” Joan asks. Why is it that Joan cannot find a way to persuade Sherlock to abandon vengeance, yet Moriarty can?

“Moriarty might be very smart, Watson, but he isn’t all-knowing.”

Sherlock’s next promise, to meet her back at the brownstone, turns out to be one they both would not be able to keep. Joan is kidnapped on the way home.

***

The air smells strongly of the ocean and the scuffed wood underneath Joan creaks when she wakes up. For an absurd moment Joan remembers that she has always wanted to live in a house by the sea, and then she catalogs the paintings. The room was strewn with paintings, some of them unfinished, all of them in the tradition of Western fine art. The Caravaggio only has its cartoon sketched but Joan inexplicably wants to touch the paper, to feel the edges of the pinpricks and to see if it feels warm.

Sherlock will nag Joan again about her neglect of physical training, but it was Sherlock’s own syllabus that prioritized breaking _in_ over breaking _out_ , which will probably be why Joan can’t just escape by herself from whatever house this is. Joan shakes at the metal on her wrists and vaguely recalls in some movie that she can maybe break out of handcuffs by dislocating her thumb. It’s probably a myth.

And then, a familiar voice.

“Joan,” it says, “I’m sorry to have to resort to kidnapping for the pleasure of your company.”

Joan is delivered abruptly from this house by the sea to her public school in 1990s’ Queens, classrooms with colors and with maps, hallways with lockers and light, a beautiful blonde girl whispering furiously to Joan while tugging her shirt, and headily, Joan asks, “Jamie?”

Jamie and Joan went to high school together but they weren’t friends, or at least, it wasn’t a normal friendship. It felt a little special and a lot unlikely because they would never have been in each other’s orbit. Joan always hung out with Kayla and Brooke, the three of them making a macabre hobby out of the travails of New York’s finest crime families, while Jamie went off and did whatever the rich and popular kids in the school were supposed to do. But they had lab together once, and maybe Jamie was impressed with the way Joan understood everything without needing to be told, the two of them finished in half of the time it took the rest of the class, or maybe it was the fact that they stayed behind and talked, after, and Joan had surprised Jamie, maybe, because Joan had surprised herself.

“Drew wasn’t persistent when he asked me out,” Joan said daringly. “I don’t need useless boys like that.”

“You want a stalker?” Jamie had smirked. “I can lend you mine.”

Joan felt guilty then, a little. She knew girls who had said no to the wrong boys. “It’s not really kind though, is it,” Joan said, “the way you lead Alice on.”

“I didn’t think you paid so much attention.”

“It’s a bit of an eyesore at this point.”

“I’ll use you as an excuse next time then,” Jamie said, with a small smile at the end of her lips. “I already promised Joan I would take her to the mall. Sorry, Alice.”

Joan giggled, embarrassingly, and affected Alice’s high voice, “Joan. _Who’s Joan?_ ”

Joan probably doesn’t agree with half of what 16-year-old Joan said back then, but she remembers to this day every conversation she and Jamie had had, feeling wicked and feeling more than the sums of her parts. And she knew she loved talking to Jamie. Loved being next to someone who was impossibly cool, a brilliant and prickly blonde bombshell who looked down her nose on everyone in their peer group except for Joan. Joan, who after that lab together, Jamie had continued to seek out, and found an excuse to be around. Some group project or another. Jamie had this way of making Joan feel like they were both in on the joke, on some secret kept between the lengths of the table where they had chemistry. And at the end of the school year they had a big field trip to the Met museum, raucous public high school teenagers suffering the indignation of shushing tour guides and insufferable European condescension, but Jamie had insisted they sat next to each other on the bus the whole way and wouldn’t leave Joan’s side for the day. Joan was in a state of giddiness, incipient summer heat forgotten, knowing right then that she was probably falling in love.

After that, Jamie disappeared.

***

“Jamie,” Joan asks, not wanting to make it a question, and until her voice trembles at the end, it was not.

The beautiful girl who had grown up to be a beautiful woman grins wickedly and nestles herself down next to Joan.

“Jamie Moriarty, at your service.”

Another shock. But there is no way to know if it’s true.

“The one talking to Sherlock on the phone was a man.”

“He serves as an intermediary for me now and then.”

“But,” Joan falters. “Is it really you, Jamie?”

Showing all her hand, Joan thinks. She doesn’t care.

A sigh. “We went to the Met. We were to complete a treasure hunt where the guards stamped our cards, but I held your hand and dragged you with me to Vanderlyn’s Garden of Versailles.”

That last trip before Jamie disappeared. Joan has been back to the museum since, but never to that gallery. Vanderlyn’s painting was a true panorama, Joan remembers, floor to ceiling spectacle, 360 degree of nineteenth century French afternoon in modern day New York. The room was dark but the painting glowed, endless, meticulously groomed trees in that soft, faded sunlight. They held hands and walked through the painting as if they were in a movie, as charmed as any lovers in the painting, in the park. For earth bound nineteenth century New Yorkers and students of Queens’ finest public high school, it was the closest they could get to the romance of France.

“And what did you tell me, when I asked you why you wanted to come?” Joan asks.

Jamie, _Jamie_ takes Joan’s face in her hands. “My dear Joan, I promised you that someday I would take you there.”

“You liar,” Joan says. She searches Jamie’s face and her own memory for signs that this is not true, but the girl she might have loved in all likelihood has grown to become the woman in front of her. Jamie is pretty, of course, having already been pretty at sixteen, the kind of eternal beauty that for ordinary girls like Joan, there was no distinction between wanting Jamie and wanting to be like her. “I should not believe you now.”

“Except—“

“Except that you have no reason to lie. Why then, Jamie, have you appeared to me now, as Moriarty? Is that why you have kidnapped me, because I knew too much about your past?”

Jamie smiles that infuriating half-smirk. “Joan, I merely removed you from our game because I remembered I liked you a lot.”

Joan refuses to dwell on Jamie’s use of the past tense. “There was no way I would have known it was you unless somehow you showed yourself. But you were content enough to go through an intermediary before. Why do you want to show yourself to Sherlock now?”

More and more questions tumble in and out of her mind. Would there be such a coincidence that Sherlock’s great enemy and the killer of his great love was once Joan’s friend? Moriarty’s elimination of Irene Adler predates Joan’s entrance into Sherlock’s life, so why did Jamie take so long to kidnap her? Why now to show herself to them both?

Did Joan really know enough of Jamie Moriarty to be a threat, and to say that she knew her at all?

Jamie gets up. “Can’t give everything away now can I? You should rest, Joan, and get comfortable.” Jamie nods to a guard, tall and big, his frame peeking out of the doorway. “Because you might be staying here for a very long time.”

***

Sherlock reminded Joan viscerally of Jamie, when Joan first met him. He had the same kind of intelligence that could make impossible lateral leaps, and the same impatience with others who were not gifted in a similar way. But Joan always felt there was a crucial sort of difference between them before she could really put words to it, and slowly Joan learned that while both Sherlock and Jamie were good liars, Sherlock lied by necessity and Jamie lied for convenience. Sherlock was honest in all the ways that mattered, honest with his feelings, honest in his mistakes, while Jamie relished in her mystery and in Joan’s intrigue. Or did she? After twenty odd years Joan could have ascribed to Jamie any number of crimes she did not commit, for the sole sin of leaving without saying goodbye.

“I knew someone like you once,” Joan told Sherlock, back when she was still his sober companion. Sherlock in his arrogance dismissed it as her meaning an addict, and addict like Sherlock, someone she met during her job, not someone she once might have loved a long time ago. Joan was quite sure she did not love Sherlock in the same way anyway. She was no longer sixteen and eager to impress, and her heart was no longer liable to break on someone else’s whim. Maybe she was afraid that once she talked about Jamie it would become too clear what Jamie meant to her, and what illusions Joan still held about being temporarily at the center of a beautiful woman’s world.

Sherlock might have understood it anyway, understood the irrational sort of deep love for a smart, beautiful woman who he might only know for a short amount of time. Held her image in amber and buried it in his heart. Everything Sherlock has ever opined about the nature of love, poetic, or complimentary, or disparaging, can be seen in the prism of Irene Adler and their brief companionship. For all of Joan’s attempts at romance and for all of her adolescent foolishness, she has never really felt the same way and she doesn’t pretend she understands it. She only knows she has witnessed that kind of love from others too many times to be able to verify that it exists.

***

The room, in addition to the paintings and the easels and the cases of oil paints, contains a moderately soft, ivory white couch. When Joan sits there she can see New York in the distance, can maybe make out the shores of Long Island Sound. When Joan pads over to the huge windows she can know what separates her from New York is steel reinforced glass and miles and miles of the sea.

Probably they are on one of those uninhabited islands off the coast of New York, abandoned by the military or by some neglectful scion decades ago. Those islands are nothing but rocks and trees, and there would need to be supplies flown in, or maybe shipped, and paint and canvas certainly do not grow out of the ground. There are going to be opportunities. Sherlock might even be able to pick up the irregularities that Joan would try her hardest to induce, in case she cannot engineer her own escape.

The cuffs on her arms might be the easy part. The difficult part is where the guards are always around. Joan finds that she is allowed to leave the room—which she has taken to call the studio—explore the floor, the kitchen, and the bathroom, but no more. A phalanx of security just for Joan’s benefit, probably more guards in this house than Joan can see. She is slightly worried that Jamie is overestimating her physical strength and prison escape prowess.

Jamie feeds her, at least. There is always breakfast supplies in the fridge and because kitchenware tend inevitably to contain unacceptable amounts of metal, lunch and dinner are MREs, which Joan shares with the guards.

“What’s your name?” Joan asks Mr. Tall and Big, on the second day when he brings her lunch.

He goes straight out of the room. “I ain’t a babysitter.”

He used to do some honest work, or so Joan guesses. There’s wear and tear on his body, like the small burns on his arms and his favoring of one leg that suggests he might have done construction work before an injury put him out of a job and onto Moriarty’s payroll. Joan follows him out.

“Oh yeah? Where’re you from?”

“Man, I got orders but none of them says I got to talk to you.”

“How about you talk to me because I’m bored and you’re bored? Your shift ends in what, four hours?”

“Congratulations, you can read the clock.”

Joan laughs. “C’mon man, don’t play hard to get.”

There’s a glint in Mr. Tall and Big’s eyes. “Call me Mike then. My mistake.”

Mike, Bumpy and Carol rotate the shifts watching Joan in the studio. They leave her be unless she wants to do something like rearrange the paintings to make a message, or try to cajole them to tell her their life woes. Jamie finds her like this, while she is annoying the fuck out of the hired hand, the next time Jamie returns.

“Hello Joan,” Jamie calls her, amused. “I leave you alone for two days and you are already making friends with my friends.”

Bumpy glares at Joan and stalks away. Joan sighs. “I thought I heard the boat coming in.”

“Yes. It was either me or your consulting partner in a daring rescue, and here I am.”

“Are you going to tell me the truth now?”

“Oh darling,” Jamie says, sweeping into the studio and handing Joan a delicately wrapped box like a peace offering. “I merely want to catch up.”

***

Jamie had asked Joan to take her out, just once. Joan usually dithered behind at school to spend time with Kayla and Brooke, but on Fridays she left as soon as it turned 3. Her mom had an extra shift on Fridays, Joan told them, and she had to take Oren home. Only Jamie ever knew that Joan wasn’t telling the truth.

“Take me with you,” Jamie told her, ordered her really, on one beautiful Friday afternoon.

“It’s _boring_ ,” Joan insisted. “We just stand around running whatever chores Mrs. Greene tells us to, and sometimes Oren tries to boss around the newer volunteers coming in and I have to tell him to fuck off.”

“You are never boring, Joan Watson,” Jamie had said, looping her arm into Joan’s elbow, and Joan had to bring Jamie to the soup kitchen then, didn’t she.

Her dad didn’t come that day, but for once Joan didn’t know if she really wanted him to. She tried hard not to glance at every guest coming in, not to look for her dad’s old coat, his best coat, a tough and thick checkered pattern over navy blue sweats. Mrs. Greene blew it all up anyway, told her, “He’s not here today, sweetie,” and Jamie must know then, or at least Jamie must know for sure. Joan stomped inside and charged herself with doing the dishes, a boring little girl longing for her boring dad who left his boring family because he heard voices that wouldn’t go away.

Jamie found her a full ten minutes later, having finally escaped from Mr. Reid and looking scarred. Joan had to smile then, at Jamie having to sit through one of Mr. Reid’s interminable, mostly made up war stories, when it was trouble enough trying to make out what he had to say. Jamie said, “I’m never coming back,” so Joan had to drag Jamie out again to argue with the old man, yelling “No, Diem was killed in 1963. At the Tet offensive in 1968 he was already dead. How could you have met him then?” And Jamie sat next to Joan the whole time, tearing her hair out, screaming silently, sending her first ever prayer to God, but never leaving Joan’s side.

“You enjoy spending time with these people,” Jamie accused her.

“Beats listening to kids talking about their dream college all the time.”

“Says someone who wants to go to medical school.”

“You know, you are the first person to be disappointed that I want to become a doctor.”

“Yes,” Jamie said. “You could be so much more.”

It was right after Halloween and the kitchen received a lot of leftover Hershey’s. Mrs. Green slipped two into Joan’s pockets because she knew Joan and Oren couldn’t go trick or treating, where they lived. Joan handed one to Jamie.

“For a good day’s work,” she said.

***

Jamie’s gift is a box of chocolates, heavy, and embossed with gold. Joan tosses it onto the table with Jamie’s paints and brushes, where it scatters the paint tubes and makes a loud thump.

“Catching up. As if you don’t already know that I have been working with Sherlock for months. What are you doing to him anyway? Why do you want to fuck with him now?”

Jamie is wearing a thin overcoat, slung over a champagne colored blouse. “More questions again. You have been stewing over this for days, Joan. Do you not have any answers for yourself?”

Joan glares at Jamie. “I know that you must have made contact with Sherlock and you are interfering with him in some way. That’s the only reason he hasn’t found this place yet even though we’re still in New York.”

Jamie smiles, delighted. Joan is torn between the pleasure that she put that smile there and the impulse to punch it off of Jamie’s face.

“What if I have kidnapped him as well?”

“Then why haven’t you kidnapped him before?”

“Tell you what,” Jamie says. “How about I promise to answer one of your questions honestly?”

Joan is thrown for a loop again. If she asks Jamie about anything important, anything that might solve Sherlock’s case or aid Joan’s escape, then there’s no guarantee that Jamie will actually tell the truth.

“That offer lasts for your entire stay here,” Jamie says, when Joan falls silent. “You can think about what you want—“

But Joan’s already decided. She asks, “Why did you leave without saying goodbye?”

Before Joan can change her mind. Before Joan can go another twenty years with this vague sense of loss and regret.

Jamie scowls. Jamie always scowls when she’s surprised. And then she always composes herself. “Why don’t you ask me what you really want to know, darling?” Jamie asks. “Did I ever love you back? Did you ever really know me?”

“And yet,” Joan says. This is what she wants to know.

Joan herself does not know what she truly felt about Jamie. At the time she reasoned that she was too uncertain to be properly in love. And how could even a sixteen-year-old Joan Watson have been so foolish as to love a would-be criminal mastermind? How foolish would Joan be now if she were to entertain feelings for the killer of her best friend’s great love? But Joan has returned to those months before Jamie disappeared too many times to pretend that they mean nothing, and if they mean something to Jamie, to Moriarty, then perhaps that could be the point from which Joan and Sherlock can begin to excavate the origins of a criminal mastermind.

“It was a combination of different factors,” Jamie says finally. “If things had happened in a different permutation…. Joan, I had always planned to leave, you know, and I had considered what I should say to you before that moment comes. That last trip to the museum, I thought, I could have that opportunity then, to convince you or persuade you or to have you by my side, but no matter how much I might have wanted it, you and I were not the same.”

Did Jamie want Joan to come with? Is that what she means? Joan’s head is spinning. What _made_ Jamie think that they were not the same?

What about Alice? Why bring Alice and not Joan?

Jamie’s face is inscrutable. Joan cannot know if she is telling the truth, only that she has promised it to Joan, and that what she is saying _feels_ true. Or maybe Joan merely wants what she is saying to be true.

“So I thought about saying goodbye,” Jamie continues. “But I wanted you to remember me, and I didn’t want you to have closure, and anyway, I expected that we would find each other again.”

At this Joan huffs. “Really? I was a surgeon until just a couple of years ago. There was no way we could have met.”

“But you’re not one now,” Jamie says. “Darling, why must you persist in claiming that you are any less extraordinary than you really are?”

“Extraordinary like you? You admitted that we’re not the same.”

“Of course we cannot be the same if—“

“Oh my God. You and Sherlock both. All megalomaniacs are the same, you realize that right?”

Jamie turns to leave. Joan didn’t mean to say that, but. She doesn’t want Jamie to leave her again, in this house by the sea where there are paintings and books and surly security and where Joan is climbing out of her skin.

A final lingering look. “Yes. And for some reason we megalomaniacs are all fascinated with you.”

***

Joan makes her first escape attempt at eight thirty-three at night, two and a half hours after she hears Jamie’s boat roar away. She can’t really delay it, with what Sherlock has already been through. A second woman who is important to him, spirited away in the middle of his battle with a cartoon villain. The woman whom he has promised to keep safe. The guilt alone would be unbearable to live with and Joan does not plan to move out of the brownstone any time soon.

She has swiped Mike’s radio and called whoever that is outside to the basement, which from their conversations she can guess exists, and where she thinks the guards spend their breaks. That gives her, hopefully, free range of her floor and the outside of the house once she has subdued Mike. She can’t seem to pick the locks on the cuffs though, so she settles for breaking the chain and letting the cuffs dangle around her wrists like an idiot.

For the first time Joan manages to leave the floor and reach the small yard outside. The cool night breeze startles, reminding Joan at the back of her mind that the house must temperature controlled, with the generator probably located in the basement. In the moment Joan catalogs chain links at the gates and barbed wires on the fence, high but scalable, newly installed. When Joan circles to the back of the house, she can see the silhouette of a small, motored fishing boat, and realizes she needs to learn how to hot wire it in five minutes or steal the keys soon. But when she tries to run for it, her cuffs makes a terrible, screeching noise. She clenches her teeth against the freefall of the bottom of her stomach.

“Argh,” Joan says feelingly. Within thirty seconds she is surrounded by four grumpy guards, two of them new faces, jolted out of their complacency and their break. Her arms are still scratched and bruised from locking Mike’s head from behind, and the other can’t be pleased with her betrayal and with what she’s done to him. But now she knows how many of them there probably are in this house.

Joan bites her lips, stemming a harsh breath. Was she really breathing that hard? But she feels calmer than she has anticipated.

“Chloroform her,” Carol says.

***

This time Joan wakes up to the same smell of the ocean but with the rasping sound of brushes against gesso. Behind a large canvas and in the soft morning light, Jamie sits, and with great concentration, paints.

“Don’t move,” Jamie tells her.

Joan realizes that she has been…arranged. Her right arm is framing her face while the other rests along her stomach, her body lying on one side. The couch has been moved so that a beam of sunlight falls directly, delicately onto one side of her face, and her eyelashes feel heavier somehow with the light as she lifts them. Circadian rhythm, she remembers, as she is abruptly reminded of how Sherlock has once tried to wake her up.

“A criminal mastermind cannot possibly have this much free time.” Joan’s voice is too sleepy, too complacent, and too loud.

“A consulting detective cannot possibly orchestrate so poorly an escape.”

Joan grits her teeth. She wants to sit up. Doesn’t. Jamie’s gaze seems like a physical object, weighing her down. All of the muses who have sat for those great white male artists, all their wives and lovers and prostitutes, she wonders if they felt the same way.

“What’s your plan with me? Do you plan to keep me indefinitely or only until this game with Sherlock ends?”

Jamie keeps painting. One question, Joan remembers, one truth.

“Is this where you have been holed up while you’re in New York? The floor is splotched with paint you know. That doesn’t happen unless you’ve been painting here for a long time.”

That feels a little too much like Joan trying to prove that she’s a decent consulting detective, really, so she stays quiet for a while. But then she can’t help it.

“You did used to love painting, so I guess at least that much was true. Back then you already had those huge canvases in your house. I didn’t realize that you had to have had them made, that you couldn’t just buy them in stores, and that you had to look for the colors in little specialty shops.”

And then. “I tried it you know, painting, in college, but I couldn’t. God, it was so expensive. The medical degree I could justify but the paints I could not.”

“I didn’t know that,” Jamie says finally. “What kind of artist were you?”

“The kind that used very small canvases. Less paint. More precision. Clean lines and soft edges. Can I see?”

“No,” Jamie says mildly, and then: “Did you do it because of me?”

“I used to imagine a lot where you might have gone,” Joan answers, without answering. “The art scene in New York, or in London maybe. A few years ago there were still small galleries here, where I would walk past a couple of them on the street, and I would look in the window without really knowing what I was looking for.”

Jamie sighs. “I never showed.”

“And I didn’t guess that you became a criminal mastermind. Couldn’t have.”

“Why not? You loved to follow those crime families.”

Joan closes her eyes. “They were already a relic of the past when we were growing up. The ones moving in were more international and less disciplined. You know, the last of the great families lived in Providence, not in New York.”

“More international and less disciplined—sounds a little familiar,” Jamie says, her lips curling, a little prideful.

This is disturbingly growing to resemble what Joan can only call shop talk. Joan has never really stopped being fascinated with the criminal underground, in their dramas and in their logic, so she can keep up with Jamie a little if only as far as it involves New York. Sherlock has little interest in it, not esoteric enough, not interesting enough on its own terms, so it remains Joan’s own extracurricular activity. The truth indeed about made guys and their big little world is that it is really mind-numbingly mundane, their petty scams of extortion and money laundering and real estate shenanigans running their own perpetual motion machines, the basic mechanics of small tragedies and human vagaries passing, seamless, from one generation to the next. For Sherlock it might be boring, but for Joan it is clarifying.

“You said something like that once,” Jamie tells her.

“You remember that?”

“I remember everything you say. That was on the bus. You had asked me to sit next to you on our way to the museum, such a simple thing, but I was very happy, and I said yes.”

Joan feels her cheeks heat. Her heart still aches a little when she thinks about that trip. The bus was dark and noisy and hot, and after a while Jamie began to fall asleep (or did she?) and Joan sat, pretending to look out the window but really watching Jamie, that soft and haughty face, those long eyelashes, huge eyes and blonde hair like she was born to be a homecoming queen, and Joan remembers feeling that that must be the prelude to something, something new, or something brave.

“This is the longest we’ve been in the same room since,” Joan observes, shaking herself out of her reverie.

“I wasn’t asleep,” Jamie says, as if Joan hasn’t spoken. “It felt flattering, actually, being an object for you to admire.”

“I—“ Joan feels self-conscious all over again. She wants to get up from the couch and run. But if she moves, will Jamie leave? “You told me many times aesthetics was your primary concern.”

“It remains my primary concern.”

“I’ve always thought that was bullshit.”

Jamie laughs. “Well, yes. I always knew you did.”

Before Jamie leaves this time, she tells Joan: “I’ve made up my mind about what I’m going to do with you. I’ve decided to keep you indefinitely, as a pet.”

***

Jamie takes the unfinished painting with her but in return for Joan’s patient modeling work, she gives her several new books. They add to the small art history library opposite of the studio, where every title is either some obscure academic treatise or an outsized, heavy collection of expensively printed reproductions.

Joan, finding that there’s really nothing on John Vanderlyn, starts in on Jamie’s obsession with Renaissance art. The artists were religious men, she discovers, obsessed with stories from the Bible and stories of death and rebirth. They were nonetheless delightful perverts and wonderful storytellers. Learning this takes approximately 1.5 arduous days of deciphering pretentious academic speak and gives precisely zero insight into the labyrinth of a criminal mastermind.

In addition to the books, there are clothes stocked in a huge closet, endless stationary carefully arranged near the windowsill, and a chess set in the corner of the library. Joan has never really played, but she knows the basic rules and she and Carol have begun to muddle their way through. Joan could probably stay here for a long time.

“Has she told you not to hurt me?” Joan asks. They have grown bored with the slow start of every chess match, and have taken to keeping in only half of each side’s pieces and placing them randomly on the board to generate a more interesting initial game state. This, Joan knows, would scandalize her parents and please Sherlock.

Carol scowls. Carol’s way into Jamie’s employ is not immediately clear to Joan, unlike Mike’s and Bumpy’s, who if he is not chained to this island right now would be at the race tracks. But Carol appears to have sustained no major workplace injuries or acquired any obvious vice. She has had some training, that much Joan knows. It’s consistent with a previous life in prostitution or domestic abuse, but somehow Joan doubts it. Maybe Jamie recruits from private security.

“A mistake, if you ask me,” Carol says. “We’re not supposed to tell you by the way, but that’s a lost cause at this point.”

Joan smiles. “You don’t think it’s worth all this trouble?”

“I think with all the shit you’ve pulled she should have had you shot on sight.”

In between the books and the chess Joan makes three additional escape attempts. On the first she manages to cut the power to the house but the warning system on the cuffs runs on a separate battery. On the second Joan tries to take out her guards one by one. It did not go well. On the third Joan takes a hostage and makes it onto the boat before her bluff is called.

Jamie is exasperated. After Joan’s third attempt Jamie calls to register her disappointment, instructing Bumpy to hold out the phone to Joan’s ear, which he does, with some amusement. But Joan’s heart speeds up as soon as she sees the phone. Her guards have always communicated on radio, and Joan couldn’t fathom the arrogance and luxury of Jamie leaving a phone here in the house. Should she try to take it here and now, or watch and wait for their complacency? But she has no way of knowing where the phone will end up.

Joan elbows Bumpy in his chest and knees him in the groin right then, wrestling the phone out of his grip. There’s at most a five-second window for her foolishness.

She dials Sherlock’s number in two seconds, her hands, surgeon hands, never once shake. Before Bumpy gets up and Carol arrives, there are three seconds, in which the call manages to connect. Right after that Bumpy destroys the phone.

A shot in the dark. What importance would Sherlock ascribe to an unknown call?

When Jamie makes it back to the island Joan is still fresh off of her latest shenanigan. The escapes aren’t Joan’s way of getting Jamie’s attention, but they are also not, not that. Jamie has now developed a distinct pattern of showing up after Joan’s attempts at escape.

“I have begun to reconsider my opinion of your intelligence with all of these ill-advised, horrifically self-destructive plans,” Jamie tells her, storming into the studio.

Joan’s mouth twitches. “You know I have no experience with prison escape.”

“Then you should stay put, darling. Look what you’ve done to your arm.”

Joan blinks innocently. “Jamie, how else will I learn?”

“You,” Jamie says. And then slowly, “That is your real plan isn’t it?”

Joan’s heart sinks. Caught, she thinks, but at this point it might not matter if Jamie knows it. Might even convince Jamie to allow Joan to leave.

“It’s basic game theory,” Joan explains, light and carefully methodical. “You have to explore the level and learn where the traps are before you can advance past it. Retrieve information by trial and error. And I’m betting I have an infinite number of lives.”

Jamie grabs Joan’s arm where her wrist is still twisted. Part of the ill-advised dive for Bumpy’s phone.

“A game? You think I will not harm you? You object so much to being here that you would destroy yourself?”

“I don’t know, Jamie. I guess I’m exploring that as well.”

Jamie’s eyes are furious.

“My limits with you.”

“Yes. Your limits. Your tolerance for your captive. Either that runs out first or the defenses of this place will.”

Sooner or later, Joan will leave or she will die trying. Joan wonders if she is too presumptuous, and if this constitutes a threat.

Jamie takes a slow, deliberate breath, then she quickly lets go of Joan’s arm.

“Sherlock Holmes and I, we think of ourselves as rational beings above the reproach of love and passion. But you,” Jamie says, “you are the cold-blooded one between the three of us after all.”

“Jamie—”

“You are the surgeon. You are the one always trying to make meaningful connections but failing to maintain the pretense of romance. Even Sherlock Holmes had his great love. Even I—“

Joan waits.

“We can leave in the morning,” Jamie says.

***

Jamie is not disgusted enough with Joan to not stay the night. Carol and Mike bring them another bed, next to the couch where Joan sleeps, and through all of it, Joan keeps thinking about what Jamie said. Surgeons are built a little different, in the first place. When Joan was young and her dad had started to develop schizophrenia, there were many nights when he didn’t come home, and Joan and her mom stayed up for word of him from the police. A lady detective had seen Joan holding her mom, small arms trying to cover thin shoulders, and the lady detective had said, you were born to be a surgeon, weren’t you. When Joan had stared at her, uncomprehending, she pulled at Joan’s wrists and held out Joan’s hands.

“See,” she said, “steady under pressure.”

So they were, and so Joan was.

Joan never thought it was anything more than a preternatural calm that put her through exams and expedited her residency. When she started working as a sober companion, her clients told her they appreciated her steady temperament and her patient but firm response to their wheedles and lies. Sherlock excitedly claimed it was the very making of a good detective.

But Joan has always known that for all of Sherlock’s disdain for the folly of human nature to let passion cloud judgment, it is only because Sherlock hates that the most about himself. Hates losing control. Hates that for the pain of losing Irene he numbed himself. For extraordinary people, extraordinary love. For Joan, a school girl crush that might have been nothing at all.

“I think,” Joan tells Jamie, apropos of nothing and in the darkness of the night. “I think I want someone who goes with me to the movie and who makes hot soup for me when I’m sick. Someone who cares if I’m unhappy and someone who I will protect with my life.”

“I don’t want a great, world ending, once in a lifetime love,” she says.

“I’m sorry,” she says, “that my plan was so shameless like that.”

A sigh. “You always had thick skin.”

“You said ‘between the three of us,’” Joan says. “Did you also know Sherlock from before? Is that why you wanted to show yourself to him?”

“I won you know,” Jamie says. “The great Sherlock Holmes couldn’t stop me, even when I telegraphed my every move.”

“What do you get if you win?”

“Approximately one billion dollars.”

Joan shakes her head, knowing Jamie can’t see it. “That’s not what I meant.”

“It’s fun,” Jamie says. “Games are supposed to be fun. Why does anyone want to win a basketball game? Why does anyone want to win anything at all? Their brain rewards them with pure euphoria. Maybe, that’s why we live.”

“The same motivation as gamblers and athletes.”

“We are all animals, darling. Society has tried, but it cannot tame desires.”

Joan scowls. “So why not basketball games? Why not solving murders like Sherlock and I? Why high stake criminal activities?”

“Why, darling, are you trying to solve me?”

“Of course,” Joan answers right away. “But you are the one allowing me to.”

A genuine laugh. “Ah,” Jamie says. “I wonder why.”

Joan thinks she can guess. Maybe Jamie Moriarty has been lonely, and maybe after a decade of operating in the shadows Moriarty now wants to be seen. And maybe that’s why she’s been toying with two consulting detectives, letting only those who could appreciate the scope of her plan to have glimpses of it.

“Will you allow me the full truth then? The whole truth to my question?” Joan presses her advantage. “Did you want me to come with you? Why did you change your mind?”

There’s a cool finger on Joan’s lips, the first physical contact they’ve had in decades, barring Jamie’s arranging Joan for her painting while she was still asleep. So light, Joan thinks, but she falls silent all the same.

“I was fifteen,” Jamie says. “I was powerless and more foolish. I thought that if someone could be seduced by the dark side then they could empathize with me, and share my desires. But Joan Watson comes from a lower-middle class family of immigrants with aspirations of social mobility. Joan Watson is entrenched in her local community. And Joan Watson wants to become a doctor.”

Jamie’s hand trace Joan’s lips in the dark, as though she has already known what the curve of Joan’s frown would be. “As special as Joan Watson’s mind was, she was never going to truly understand Jamie Moriarty.”

Joan’s heart clenches. A vague sense of loss. Is Joan really going to regret leaving her kidnapper too soon and before she can solve her?

“Can I have one more truth?”

“This is the last thing I will tell you,” Jamie says, “but I’m going to tell you what you already know. I was not in love with you twenty years ago, but you were the one whose opinion I held in highest regard and whose affections I most badly coveted.”

At this Jamie turns away. Not before Joan tells her,

“Likewise.”


	2. The Chase

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Are they trying to solve Moriarty or are they merely relitigating their pasts? Are they excavating the origins of a criminal mastermind or are they just looking for the parts of Moriarty that were real and the parts that weren’t?

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I really did not like Jamie’s portrait of Joan in canon. It’s too academic. There’s no thirst in it.

 

In the morning Carol escorts Joan to land. Jamie has gone in the night. A second boat left not for New York but for the sea, sunk as a decoy while Jamie Moriarty traveled inside a shipping container of a passing ocean liner. All precautions in case Sherlock Holmes deciphers the meaning of a call from an unknown number that connects for less than one second, which demonstrates, Joan hopes, that Sherlock is not yet grievously injured or dead.

Carol and Joan are in another speed boat, making straight for the shores of Long Island Sound. Joan is cuffed and sits in the front, roaring wind in her hair and the clothes she wore the day she was kidnapped on her back. Questions that she had meant to ask, and should have asked Jamie race through her mind, and her sentimentality exasperates her now. All the questions she could have asked and she chose to ask why Jamie left without saying goodbye. What would Joan be able to tell Sherlock about Moriarty? What would reveal Moriarty’s weakness but not her own? What would be left once Joan has hidden her weakness? What would escape the keen eyes of Sherlock Holmes?

Joan finds that she has missed Sherlock. Missed being able to think out loud at him and missed berating him for conducting obnoxious, thoroughly unscientific and foul smelling experiments in their home. Missed his loud sense of justice and his quiet affections. And Joan hopes that her returning in four days will alleviate his guilt.

It is pandemonium once they reach shore. Joan has walked away from Carol for precisely five feet before they are surrounded and the police have forced her to the ground. Captain Gregson is on a loudspeaker and everyone’s radios seem to come alive. When Joan can turn around and look, Carol already has her hands up and Marcus is slowly approaching the boat.

“Watson,” Sherlock shouts. In five breathless strides he reaches her and in one frantic movement he dismantles the cuffs on her wrists. Joan catalogs a wound in his shoulder and several days without sleep in his eyes, and her “ _Sherlock_!” is so reproachful that he submits to a hug.

“What happened?” Joan lets go of him, and asks him in the same accusatory voice.

“Your one-second call,” Sherlock says. “The number was blocked but we were able to trace it to a cell tower, the only cell tower that exists for the cluster of islands where you were held. From there we had to make educated guesses about what would happen next.”

“That’s not what I meant. What happened to your shoulder?” Joan turns him around and feels around the bandage.

“A small bullet,” Sherlock frowns. “The pain has been most helpful in allowing me to stay awake.”

There was never any doubt in Joan’s mind that she would see him again soon, but.

“Sherlock,” Joan says, and then hugs him again, this tall, warm and anxious British man making himself small so that he would fit in her arms. There are two awkward, British pats on her back. “I am so glad you’re safe.”

“Watson,” he says, and with considerable hesitation, “I have failed to keep my promise to you.”

“Do you see me with a bullet in my fucking shoulder? I’m unharmed, Sherlock.”

“Comparing injuries, very touching,” Marcus says. He has finished processing Carol and is idly watching the Tearful Reunion, his mouth all amusement and his eyes all relief.

“Thank you for the daring rescue,” Joan says, pulling Marcus in. “And sorry I couldn’t escape sooner and help you spoil Moriarty’s plans.”

A suspicious sniffle. “Self-defense must be moved up on your curriculum, Watson.”

“I’m sure that’s the relevant lesson,” Marcus says.

***

A lot of what Joan has already guessed is true. Jamie really is Moriarty, and she has approached Sherlock herself, preparing for a confrontation that could not afford the complications of her and Joan’s past.

But there remains much of Moriarty’s plan—too creative, too coincidental, too depraved—that Joan could not have guessed. It was beyond Joan’s imagination that Moriarty is simultaneously Joan Watson’s high school friend and Sherlock Holmes’ great lost love. Nor would Joan have guessed that Moriarty would return to Sherlock in the form of Irene Adler and planned with him to elope. Maybe the moment that Joan walked into Sherlock’s life, she and Jamie were destined to meet again. Some pieces slot into place. Some snag on Joan’s heart and refuse to fit. Moriarty’s perfect understanding of how Sherlock thinks and feels. Moriarty’s game as an elaborate courting ritual. Jamie’s hesitation when she said, _Even I_.

Over bracingly hot tea, Sherlock confesses to Joan, shame-faced, that he has slept with a criminal mastermind for months and loved her for years without knowing it. Joan’s kidnapping, Irene Adler’s return, the shocking discovery, all of it conspired to distract the great Sherlock Holmes who it turned out was not able to disrupt Moriarty’s plot.

“Sherlock, that’s not,” Joan interrupts Sherlock’s maddening self-flagellations. “Don’t do that. Are you okay?”

God. In the unreality of that house by the sea, Moriarty the criminal mastermind became so abstract to Joan that her immediate crime was only Joan’s kidnapping, which Joan has already forgiven her for. But now, returned to Sherlock and returned to society, Joan is forcefully reminded of all the things that being criminal mastermind entails. Sinking Sherlock into addiction is probably the least of Moriarty’s crimes, but one Joan will never forgive her for.

“On the contrary, it gave me clarity,” Sherlock says. “I now have a proper nemesis. She is very smart, and she might be smarter than I am,” Sherlock considers Joan. “But she won’t beat me again because I will have you with me.”

Joan’s face warms. She thinks Sherlock might re-evaluate her abilities once he hears of the absurd presumptuousness of Joan’s escape plot and her sentimentality in asking Jamie her one truth.

“I hear that Moriarty made away with a billion dollars,” Joan says, stalling for the moment when she will have to make her own confession. Sherlock launches into Moriarty’s intricate plot to murder some Greek diplomat over Macedonia’s entry into the Eurozone, while Joan bites the inside of her mouth and sits on her hands in an effort to keep still. How does Joan even begin to explain everything that happened in the last few days when she has failed to make sense of it herself? Did Jamie let Joan go because of her plan or because Jamie already pulled off her billion-dollar plot?

None of it escapes Sherlock’s attention. “Watson,” Sherlock says in the middle of berating himself again for not being able to prevent a murder, and crosses his arms, “what on earth are you hiding?”

Joan asks him, “Do you remember when I said I met someone like you once?”

She decides to tell Sherlock most of it. That Joan and Jamie were high school friends, that Jamie painted her, and how Joan seemed to have engineered her own escape. What Joan keeps to herself are the things she cannot bear to say out loud for fear the memory will fade with each retelling: The Garden of Versailles, Jamie in Mrs. Greene’s soup kitchen, Joan’s squandering of her truth.

Sherlock, astonished, asks, “Watson, did you love her?”

“No,” Joan says, remembering their last conversation. “I don’t think what I felt for her was love.”

“What about Moriarty?”

“I don’t think she can feel love. Only desires. She desired you alive. She desires to win, and.”

“She desires Joan Watson’s affections and respect.”

Joan frowns. That is almost exactly what Jamie told her.

Sherlock grimaces. “Like you said, Watson, Moriarty and I are a little similar. It seems that we have this in common as well.”

***

The first night Joan is back at the brownstone she dreams of the house by the sea. At least, she dreams of a strange fractal of that house and her high school, because Joan and Jamie are young suddenly, young all over again, exchanging promises between the ends of their eyes and secrets between the corners of their lips. Simple promises. See you back at the house. Let’s spend time together next week. We’ll both get out of the exam early so we can go to the library before we go home. Some are things they really did, some are Joan’s wishful thinking, and all of them are sweetly, worryingly sentimental things, and when Joan wakes up, before Sherlock comes over, she finds that she would have liked to stay asleep.

If Jamie was a different person, if Jamie was an artist instead of a criminal mastermind, what would Joan have wanted her to say when they meet again? That she missed Joan? That she didn’t forget about Joan? What would have happened eventually? What did the real Jamie say to Joan when they met again? That she would take Joan to Versailles? Joan has never been to Versailles, and she has never even been to France despite some of her clients inviting her to go. Has she been saving it? Maybe that is even more foolish now that they might never again meet.

There is a stillness in the brownstone that only comes with a deeply hibernated Sherlock, and it feels a little like Joan is trespassing on his trust to fantasize about his nemesis. It’s 5:41 AM, nineteen minutes until Sherlock’s frightening internal clock kicks in, and nineteen minutes until fantasy collapses under the scrutiny of Sherlock’s relentless quest for the truth. The weak morning light threatens to break over her blinds. Joan closes her eyes and burrows herself into her sheets, but it’s already too late. Her mind is already cranking out the day’s itinerary, their next course of investigation, the fact that they have to find Alice Petreas very, very soon.

***

But Marcus and Captain Gregson insist that they walk through the apparent crime scene first before they embark on Joan’s esoteric mission of finding Alice Petreas. The house where Jamie held Joan is already cleared of its occupants and its physical evidence when the police arrive. In the middle of the studio, however, there is something new. Marcus whistles when he sees the painting, even though it is not at all that scandalous. Joan is fully clothed, lying on the couch, and arranged in a pose that felt far less sensual when she was doing it than when she is looking at it now, because it is the same pose she has seen over and over again in any art museum, where the women’s eyes are lidded and inviting, their bodies undulating curves, and their bare skin as soft as the linens underneath them.

“I thought she would leave it here,” Sherlock says, satisfied. “It’s your present, Watson, and a declaration of intent.”

Joan scowls at her oil counterpart. “Well, I don’t like it.”

“It really looks like you though,” Marcus says.

“I never made that face!”

 “I’m sure once Holdings is done _not_ finding any usable evidence on the painting you can have it back.”

“We don’t have any place to put it.”

“It’s true,” Sherlock frowns. “Once framed, it will be quite big, and we don’t want to sacrifice that much of our wall space when we need to use it for our cases.”

Joan reaches out and holds onto the back of the chair. “You want it _framed_?”

***

“So tell me about Alice Petreas,” Sherlock says.

Twenty years ago, in the middle of the hazy summer months between sophomore and junior years, Jamie disappeared. She had moved away, their teacher said. No one except the one admin lady really knew about it, and Ms. Carpenter herself didn’t know much else beyond the fact that the appropriate paperwork had been filed. Brooke asked Joan once, where Jamie had gone, and Joan had to admit that she didn’t know because they weren’t close enough friends.

But that kind of thing happens. They had another kid who moved away between the school years, just that year, and two who moved in the middle of a semester. Family circumstances are careless with budding school girl romances like that. Jamie was a popular girl, but there wasn’t much gossip at all about why she had gone. She was so smart, the teachers said wistfully, and she was probably breaking new hearts at her new school, the students guessed boldly. She had already broken Alice Petreas’s heart. Look at how Alice was coping. She didn’t seem to have any life left.

Alice Petreas’ disappearance two months later sparked far more gossip than did Jamie’s. She left a message for her parents that later the police had decided was a suicide note. Don’t look for me. I am OK. Please don’t look for me because you won’t find me.

Unlike Jamie, Alice’s parents never withdrew her from the registrar. The police pulled some kids from class and asked them if they knew where she was, or where Jamie was, in case Alice followed her. The rest of the school watched the manhunt on the evening news. The police expected to find Alice on some train across the country, and then they expected to find her under some bridge, but true to her words, Alice Petreas was never found.

“You think Petreas has really managed to follow Moriarty,” Sherlock asks.

“I think Moriarty facilitated Petreas’ disappearance. No high school girl had the resources to make a fool of police investigations like that. Well,” Joan amends, “no one except Moriarty.”

“What was Moriarty’s family circumstances?”

“Ah. I never knew. It didn’t really matter what someone’s parents did, you know, unless they were doctors or lawyers.”

A harrumph. “Then why are we on the way to the correctional facility and not to see your old school?”

Joan smiles. They have arrived at the station. “Because if I’m right, then the city of New York already has Alice Petreas in custody.”

***

There is so much that Joan wants to ask Sherlock but there is so little time. They are working against an invisible clock. Moriarty will try to destroy the remaining traces of her childhood in Queens as quickly as Joan and Sherlock will try to pick up the thread and unravel the mystery of Moriarty. But if there was time, Joan would ask Sherlock if he felt he might use again—not so bluntly, or perhaps exactly that bluntly—because if he needs something for that bullet in his shoulder then Joan would prefer she be the one to administer it. As it is they are not even out of sight of each other for long enough for Sherlock to get away with anything so big.

And maybe when things wind down, Joan would ask Sherlock what falling in love with Moriarty was like, and how Moriarty might feign being in love, or how indeed Moriarty was like when she was in love, so that Joan might immunize herself from it. And maybe in a slow moment during their breathless pursuit, Joan would ask Sherlock what they are doing, why they are doing this, because there is no case and there is no threat and they are both not in their right mind. Are they trying to solve Moriarty or are they merely relitigating their pasts? Are they excavating the origins of a criminal mastermind or are they just looking for the parts of Moriarty that were real and the parts that weren’t? But there is no time, and so they are blindly grasping at the handful of clues Moriarty has left.

***

Carol hasn’t given the police her real name on the grounds that she might incriminate herself, which means that she hasn’t been properly prepared with an alternate identity. Maybe Moriarty did not expect the arrest, or maybe Moriarty did not want her sacrificial lamb to know it was being led to jail. Sherlock floats both of these possibilities to Carol.

“But these scenarios are not equally probable,” Sherlock says. “You know as well as I do why Moriarty has allowed you to be captured. The same reason that you have a public defender sitting here and not someone who can spend more than ten minutes on your case. Moriarty believes you are unlikely to betray her, and yet at the same time expendable to her.”

“Whatever loyalty you may feel for Moriarty,” Joan says, “she doesn’t return it.”

“What can you offer?” Carol’s legal aid asks cautiously.

“I told you,” Carol snaps, “These people have nothing that I want.”

In Carol’s eyes Joan imagines she can see the shadow of the old Alice. Alice Petreas, curly haired, brown eyed, stubborn and brash and unafraid. Didn’t give a damn about what other people thought, and knew so clearly what she wanted at sixteen that she could leave behind her family and her friends and her childhood to follow it.

Joan says, “Alice, Jamie doesn’t return whatever loyalty you may still feel.”

A flash of understanding. Sherlock crosses his arms.

“Is that right,” Alice says. Alice has never been able to lie very well. Even before, even when Alice was Carol and they were still in that house by the sea Joan had thought Carol was too honest with how she felt, incapable of hiding when she was happy and when she was upset, incapable of hiding who she hated. And incapable of hiding who she loved.

“You might not believe me but I understand how you feel,” Sherlock says. “I understand loving a woman who cannot love you back.”

“Sherlock—”

“Are you treating this like something I didn’t already know?” Alice sounds a little angry.

Her legal aid is appalled. “Please keep the conversation on the case. This is not an interrogation.”

But Alice doesn’t stop. “I have never needed her to love me back. Never. I didn’t want anything more than her happiness.”

“It’s normal to desire reciprocation.”

“Like you said. Not from her.” Alice sneers. “Did you think I was stupid? Did you think I was also tricked just because you were? I was the _only_ one who knew the _truth_.”

A flare of something painful in Joan’s chest.

“She’s not admitting to anything.”

“Fine,” Joan says. “We won’t ask you to betray Moriarty. We just want to know more about you.”

“How did you do it,” Sherlock explains. “How did a high school student manage to disappear from the face of the earth?”

Alice is gathering her composure. “What? Why do you want to know that?”

“For my own peace of mind,” Joan says. “I want to know if Moriarty helped you do it, and how you managed to convince her to take you with her.”

“What is this,” the legal aid has her head in her hands. Alice should probably listen to her legal aid a lot more than she is now, but Alice probably doesn’t believe in any kind of trust that was not forged in world-ending, unselfish, unalloyed love.

“You want to know why she told me and not you.”

“Basically.”

Sherlock looks sharply at Joan, but doesn’t protest.

“I,” Alice says. “I always knew that Jamie was meant for bigger things. Even if Jamie didn’t leave right then I knew high school would not last forever, and once school ended she would be gone, gone from me, so I was watching for it.”

“It.”

“The signs. Jamie started spending a lot more time with you, as much as she wanted to, as much as she didn’t allow herself to before. You didn’t understand the meaning of it.”

“But you did.”

“I did.” Alice looks a little prideful now. “She was determining how she felt about you, and if you would come with her if she asked. By that summer she was ready to let you go.”

Alice is watching for Joan’s reaction. Joan lets some of it through, hoping to get Alice to talk a little more. A bit of Joan’s school girl disdain for slower students comes back, unbidden and ugly, but Alice was always too suggestible. Easy to take advantage of.

Once, Joan overheard Jamie telling her other friends, her cool friends, laughing and telling them that Jamie was improbably, disproportionately the recipient of a number of one-sided lesbian infatuations, more so than she was actually the target of boys’ love. For days Joan was terrified that Jamie was talking about her. For days Joan avoided Jamie, spent more time with Kayla and Brooke, and had her Walkman on when Jamie usually approached her. Was Jamie only talking about Alice or did she also count Joan among her lesbian admirers? And if she did, what gave Joan away, or what did Jamie see that Joan herself could not? Why must Joan be a part of Jamie’s delusion and hideous bragging? Joan felt then some misplaced solidarity with Alice. To this day Joan doesn’t know if that made Joan want Jamie more, or if it confirmed to Joan that Jamie was something she could never have.

It’s only normal to desire reciprocation.

“And you confronted her before she left?”

Alice is sunk in reverie. “I thought about what to do for days, with every day feeling like the last chance I had. I could confess, but it wouldn’t do anything, and it’s not like she didn’t already know. I could ask her about her plans for the next year, but she would lie, and besides she would see immediately through it.

“In the end I waited until her birthday to give her a compass, the most delicate, expensive one I could find in that pawn shop at the corner of thirty first. Seventy-two dollars back then. The hand was made of real gold, and there was ivory on the top of the box. I promised her, I’ll follow you anywhere you want to go.”

“What happens after that?” Sherlock asks.

“She gave me an address. A big, old house on Tenth Avenue. Be here on February fourteenth and someone will take you to me. And then I was on the train for a long time, shuttled back and forth until I arrived exactly where I should be.”

“And where was that?”

Alice smiles. “No, that’s not something I can tell you.”

“What did you do for her?”

“She can’t tell you that either,” the legal aid cuts in. “In fact, I’m not hearing a deal, so this meeting is over.”

“Alice—“

Alice glances over at the legal aid. “Now, I don’t actually want to antagonize my legal representation, so I think we have to end it here.”

“Sorry Alice,” Joan says.

“Sorry counselor,” Sherlock says, “but I hope we can talk again.”

“Joan.”

It’s the first time Alice calls Joan by her name.

No, it happened once before, some short time after Jamie started hanging out with Joan. Alice came over to where they were talking and asked to go home with Jamie. I can’t, Jamie said. I’ll be a little late, because Jamie had a meeting with some club, because Jamie was always part of some club. And Alice said, I can wait, I have some homework to do anyway. It went on like that, and finally Jamie looked at Joan, shrugged. What can you do.

Joan looked desperately anywhere but Alice. Later Joan realized that she could not bear to witness that kind of vulnerability. Maybe she was a little envious of it. And after Jamie had spirited off to her club, when Joan was packing up to go home, Alice had called her back. Said, Joan, you thought that was pathetic didn’t you. You thought it was sad. And Joan didn’t know what to say, so she left.

“Joan,” Alice calls her now, for the third time.

“Yeah?”

“The way you look at me has changed.”

Joan looks down, unconsciously, away from Alice’s eyes. “I regretted not being your friend before.”

Alice leans back, one hand coming up to scratch the back of her head, a little embarrassed but not used to showing it.

“Thanks,” Alice says. “Thanks for coming.”

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Coming up next: Jamie's past


	3. Interlude

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> "I wanted to see how it would feel."
> 
> Fanart.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Er. I'll write this scene soon?


End file.
